The mood hung heavy over the town hall meeting in St. Charles Parish two weeks ago, as more than 950 residents – devastated, despondent, fearful, furious – gathered to voice concerns and air grievances over the latest preliminary FEMA flood insurance rate maps. The preliminary maps, if adopted, could increase flood insurance rates for parish residents – including those living in areas with levee protection that have never before flooded -- by tens of thousands of dollars each year.

The parade of representatives from FEMA and various political offices did little to calm the crowd, each meeting with audible jeers as they took to the stage at Hahnville High School. But when Joe Suhayda – a civil engineer and geomorphologist whose sweet spot includes analyzing flood maps and isolating inaccuracies in an effort to launch appeals -- stepped up to the podium, for the first time all night, the crowd began to cheer.

Dr. Joseph Suhayda.

“I would like to introduce you all to Dr. Joe Suhayda,” said St. Charles Parish Chief Administrative Officer Buddy Boe, the evening's emcee. During his brief introduction, Boe referred to Suhayda as the man with “the greatest chance of changing the maps we’re considering.”

One week later, several outspoken residents from Bayou Gauche, Des Allemands and Paradis turned up at St. Charles Parish Council meeting to pledge support for Suhayda. That night, the council unanimously approved a contract to hire him.

"My personal opinion is, if anybody is going to be able to make this turn around so that people in our area will be able to afford their insurance rates, it is Dr. Suhayda,” said St. Charles Parish President V.J. St. Pierre. "I want to expend every resource; every dollar we can on this appeal."

For St. Charles Parish, that appeals process begins with Suhayda. And for many St. Charles Parish residents who feel that their future is now in the hands of a federal agency with little concern for community preservation, Suhayda represents a beacon of hope amidst a dismal situation.

“People view me as a scientist, as kind of a savior,” Suhayda said with a chuckle. “That’s not me – that’s a persona. But it’s not bad, and I can use that. People need that. And I wouldn’t be here now if I wasn’t sure I could back it up.”

Suhayda – who has in the past worked with Terrebonne, Lafourche, Cameron and Plaquemines parishes – is currently working on building an appeal for flood maps for St. Tammany Parish. St. Charles will be Suhayda’s latest challenge. At $200 per hour, Suhayda's salary is capped at $42,000.

Born in Michigan and raised in California, Suhayda attended University of California, San Diego, and graduated with an advanced degree in oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the world’s most prestigious science programs. Upon graduation, Suhayda moved to Louisiana to accept a position at LSU, where he specialized in marine science.

“I started studying Louisiana, and I came up with some knowledge about how it was functioning, the sediments and waves and currents,” Suhayda said. At the time, one of Suhayda’s colleagues was working as a consultant for Gulf Coast-based oil companies, and by 1975, Suhayda began doing similar consulting work. A few years after FEMA was created in 1979, Terrebonne Parish contacted Suhayda and asked for help revising its newly-issued flood maps. While working in Terrebonne, Suhayda developed a methodology of analyzing muds in Louisiana. Shortly thereafter, FEMA requested Suhayda’s services as well.

“I informed them of the information I had, and they paid me to include it in their flood insurance study,” Suhayda said. “There’s an article, a report I did for FEMA where they changed their methodology. They took advantage of the criticism to improve it.”

Of FEMA’s methodology, Suhayda said he knows arguably “more than most FEMA consultants do, and that puts the advantage potentially in our court.”

Over the next two or three months, Suhayda will be tasked with analyzing the St, Charles Parish preliminary FEMA flood maps to identify technical deficiencies that could give the parish an edge in proving that that certain communities – such as Bayou Gauche and Paradis – are less susceptible to flooding than the preliminary maps suggest.

“I’m defining technical deficiencies,” Suhayda said. “There’s a question of data, for example, topography, a missing a levee, a missing a roadway, misplacing a roadway; a railroad embankment or a highway road has a pretty big impact on flooding, and sometimes [FEMA] puts the wrong elevation or wrong location for the highway road. They’ve made mistakes,” he said.

According to its guidelines, FEMA is required to use the "best available" geographical data to develop its flood maps nationwide. But according to Suhayda, the best available data is not necessarily geographically accurate, or up to date. As a consequence, the maps
do not always take into account recent environmental changes that may affect
flood conditions.

“We know they didn’t take any ground truth. They didn’t go out and measure stuff,” Suhayda said. “They used GIS and LIDAR, which is an airborne system. And we know there are mistakes in it; we know there are errors. Our approach is not to say your maps are wrong. We’re going to use the appeal process to make the maps more site-specific, more current.

“There have been situations where parishes improved their levees,” Suhayda continued. “If [FEMA] mapped the levee at five feet, and the parish since improved its levee to eight feet, we come back with documentation and say to FEMA, 'Listen, your maps are based on five feet, the levees are eight feet now.'”

This isn’t Suhayda’s first rodeo; over the years the engineer has helped parishes across Louisiana successfully appeal their preliminary FEMA flood maps. Last year, Cameron Parish adopted its flood maps after Suhayda was able to prove a technical deficiency that prompted FEMA to completely redesign them.

“Cameron Parish is extreme west, along the Texas border; the topography is different there,” said Suhayda, who effectively helped the parish fight V-zone designation that would have disqualified the majority of the parish from any federal funding to rebuild in case of a flood.

“Their objective was to get rid of the V-zones and I knew what the V-zones resulted from, which is the wave height,” Suhayda said. “And I knew what affected the wave height, which is topography, vegetation and elevation. Ultimately, [Cameron Parish] spent $1.5 million to document the vegetation. We re-did the maps. We showed FEMA– and meanwhile they were participating and checking our data – that the old maps are wrong. FEMA said OK, you proved it. So, they changed them.”

Suhayda said he plans to employ a similar tack in St. Charles Parish, but declined to elaborate on his strategy. If Suhayda is able to identify significant technical deficiencies, it’s up to the parish whether or not it wants to spent the money necessary to collect fresh data with which to re-craft the flood maps.

Suhayda said that by and large, he has experienced some level of success with each appeal he's filed, though not every endeavor has been a slam-dunk. But as Suhayda begins assessing the existing maps in St. Charles, he says he remains convinced that by the time he's finished, the parish will, at the very least, have leverage.

“Here’s an analogy: my sister-in-law was dating a professional gambler. I was talking with him, and asked, ‘How the heck are you so lucky?’ He said, 'It’s not luck; I won’t gamble if the odds are fair. The odds have to be in my favor,'” Suhayda said. “I have to know how you’re going to play, or I’m not going to play. I’m not going to direct the parish to a line of attack on the maps unless I’m convinced we’re going to win.”